Barron Gift Collier was born on March 23, 1873 in Memphis, Tennessee, United States of old English stock. He was the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls, of Cowles Miles and Hannah Celeste (Shackelford) Collier. He dropped the "Gift" from his name in middle life. His parents were in modest circumstances, but in boyhood Barron resolved to attain success and wealth.
He left school at fifteen to become a messenger for a railroad office.
At seventeen, with a young partner, he installed street lamps in some of the suburban streets of Memphis. Shortly thereafter, while in partnership with another youth in a small printing business, he obtained his first contract for placing advertising cards in street cars, this in Springfield to be soon followed by his second in Chattanooga and his third in Memphis. In 1900 he removed to New York City, where he rapidly expanded his surface transportation advertising operations. In 1905-06 he organized the Street Railways Advertising Company as a national sales organization. Then, one after another, he bought the street-car and bus advertising companies in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities until he was practically supreme in the transportation advertising business in the United States. His final important purchase was that of Artemas Ward, Inc. , which controlled the advertising and vending privileges in the Interborough subways in New York City. As his advertising business grew, Collier became interested in the lower west coast of Florida. He had purchased Useppa Island, off the coast, for a winter home; now he began buying large acreages on the nearby mainland, then undeveloped and much of it in swamp, ultimately acquiring more than a million acres. He built a paved road, hitherto considered impracticable, across a part of the Everglades and adjacent swamps to complete what is now known as the Tamiami Trail, from Tampa to Miami. In that area he founded towns, created hotels, banks, newspapers, and telephone lines. In 1923 the state legislature cut a large section from another county and set it up as a new political unit known as Collier County, in his honor. Meanwhile, by reason of his vast investments, he became a director and official in many banks and other corporations. He owned Luna Park, a great amusement enterprise at New York's Coney Island, for more than fifteen years. Collier was active in many causes, notably the Boy Scouts. Police work also interested him; for some time he was a special deputy police commissioner of New York City, concentrating on public safety at street crossings. He also labored in the International World Police organization, with the object of promoting the exchange of criminal identification data and the return of captured criminals to the countries where they were wanted for crimes. For this he was decorated by the governments of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Roumania, and other countries. He was a member of dozens of clubs in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Memphis, not to mention various state historical societies, the Pilgrims, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Handsome, winning, dynamic, restless, high-strung, Collier was an inveterate user of the telephone--local and long-distance--and completed many business transactions through this medium. He wrote two books, Stopping Street Accidents (1925) and How Is Business in the United States (1927). He died of a heart attack in New York City and was buried there in Woodlawn Cemetery.
He married Juliet Gordon Carnes of Memphis on November 26, 1907, and she and their three sons, Barron, Samuel Carnes, and Cowles Miles, survived him.
